in the kitchen, waiting for him. Arriving later than he’d planned turned his entrance into an event and, inevitably, a performance.
They were well into their drinks, a fact most clearly announced by the state of the once carefully composed display of local cheeses, crackers, and Italian olives that had been reduced to an unappetizing scattering of crumbs, masticated olive pits, and waxy cheese rinds. Thanks to his tardiness, the drinking had continued without movement toward the dinner table. The mess of the cheese board would be there until morning, giving the unlucky first to rise a further shock in their state of bleary dehydration as they entered the dispiriting disorder of the kitchen.
In bed, acutely missing the presence of the dog tucked under the covers to her left, Alice listened sleepily to Peter’s postmortem snark. He whispered into the phone from what he called the two W’s guest room in the country, his library voice made sloppy and silly by drink. He studiously avoided any mention of the dog.
Of course they made pasta, Peter whispered to Alice from the dark of his bed. I told you they would. A giant pile of bucatini with nothing beyond a few pine nuts and basil to make it worth eating. I added an obscene pile of Parmesan. I think Wendy thought I was drunk, a giant airy mound of shavings—it was like an anthill of cheese. To hell with a polite dusting. Fuck it. Would it kill them to cook a little protein?
Goodnight, P., she said. Talk tomorrow. Love you.
Alice hadn’t had a decent orgasm in six months. Masturbating with a pet in the bed felt awkward and a shade off, but Maebelle had grown used to the noise and movement and generally slept through the whole proceeding. Now she was gone.
Prone beneath the weightless duvet, warm and clean after her bath, Alice considered retrieving her toy. She might lull herself to sleep but hesitated at the prospect of a mediocre orgasm. Tucked snugly inside a white felt shoe bag on the shelf next to her bed, it was certainly handy. Two years ago she’d bought the slim appliance on Amazon. With its smooth, ballerina-pink silicone exterior and rounded ergonomic handle, it looked and sounded like the Clarisonic buffer she maneuvered over the contours of her face each night before bed.
Peter, spotting the buffer in the bathroom, couldn’t resist saying, Oh, so that’s what you’re up to in there. Alice had rebuffed him, scoffing at his feigned ignorance.
Oh please, she’d said with a laugh. Imagine away, bristles and all.
The real, distinctly bristle-free item was fantastic, no question. But for some reason it had been delivering less-than-overwhelming results lately. The always-waiting porn on her phone rested not even a foot away from her head, the screen still glowing from Peter’s call.
Alice thought back to her first Mac computer, a clunky oversize machine in garish pink that had filled the depth of her broad desk. It had seemed sleek and elegant—back when it was. Then, the cozy bed-bound laptops, phones, and iPads, as easily slipped between the sheets as tucked in a bra, didn’t exist even in Steve Jobs’s expansive imagination. Now the slick devices had taken over, occupying every moment as forcefully as a species of highly demanding house pet.
To soften the edge of her feminist guilt, Alice liked to think her incorporation of the seedy terrain of fleshy images into her mental and physical landscape was fairly innocent. Tentative and incremental, she’d started with Gustav Klimt’s Woman Seated with Thighs Apart, one of the images that populated the margins of the masturbation Wikipedia entry. Another of Alice’s favorites in those early days was Peter Johann Nepomuk Geiger’s 1840 watercolor depicting a monk in drab robes fingering a woman, the folds of her green skirt, white stockings, and full thighs rendered in exquisite detail as her left hand grips the erect penis visible at the parting of his robe. Alice was vaguely troubled by the forceful valence of the painting. In her mind, the monk had pursued the woman whose willing acquiescence made the stealthy act so steamy.
Whatever she discovered, googling the word with the purpose of getting off on the text and images lined up to define it had been subversive enough to get her blood moving. It all seemed quaint now. When the utility of the sexually relevant Wikipedia entries had been spent (cunnilingus, sex, pornography), she progressed to erotica. There, selecting the category constituted the most terrifying confession of desire: lesbian, incest, voyeur, bondage, S&M. Forced to make up her mind, Alice confronted her erotic triggers as an array of choices as long as a folio-size laminated diner menu. Deciding on one put her in direct contact with her subconscious; she’d had no idea what excited her until it was revealed by her physical response to the categories. She was more subversive than she’d ever admitted to herself, her taste for public sex and lesbian scenes entirely at odds with her history.
She’d arrived at the porn gala late and, she liked to think, reluctantly, wearing no makeup and a frowsy flannel nightgown. But she had arrived. Now, reaching for her phone and felt bag, she was reminded for the second time that day of her childhood and of hours of naughty pleasure passed eating sweets under the covers with a flashlight and a novel.
Sunday, May 27, Memorial Day Weekend
It was less cocktail party than wake. Six strangers in private mourning. But Alice wanted her dog—they all did—so she remained positioned around the vast round glass coffee table, her lanky body perched tensely on the edge of one of two semicircular white leather sofas. Ten exquisitely groomed toenails lay displayed through the glass, magnified as if seen through clear water. Red. Navy. Frosted Pink. Fuchsia. Her own dark camouflage, nearly identical to the rich green coccolithophore, a phytoplankton that had been the subject of her first serious research project in high school. An adjacent pair of amber leather loafers complimented her green.
All but one of the group were slugging back a resinous cabernet sauvignon the color of dried blood. A leathery woman who somewhere along the way had decided overprocessed white-blonde hair, red lipstick, and heavy mascara was the look she wanted, took frequent sips of her conspicuously clear beverage, the fetal lime wedge resting on an ice shelf within a testament to what she suspected was nothing so fun as gin but rather an inefficient gesture to accommodate sobriety in a room of drinkers.
Five desperate women and a token male, each one missing a dog, brought together by a string of Facebook posts on Manhattan-Lost-Dog. After a flurry of public posts, a group had peeled off into a private discussion with the private discussion leading to a gathering on a Memorial Day weekend Sunday evening. The decision to meet in person felt old-fashioned and dangerous. The easily dismissed text on Alice’s screen was embodied before her—each with a face, voice, mannerisms, style, and scent of his or her own.
How had she ended up here, in this impossibly wealthy woman’s apartment, high above the twinkling lights that formed the perimeter of the unlit lagoon of Central Park? Could she ever be friends—or even friendly—with any of them? It seemed unlikely, though she eyed the sole male member of the group, assessing the French cuffs of his Charvet shirt. She felt herself as separate from them all as the neatly white-aproned maid surely felt from the guests she served, discreetly passing the smoked salmon canapés, moving among them as invisibly as possible—eyes down, frequent nods, a flash of a smile and understated nod in place of You’re welcome. Who kept a maid in uniform anymore, anyway? The ensemble, from the white piping on the black shirtdress to the scalloped edge of the linen apron to the lace headpiece, suggested a bawdy bedroom farce. Alice tried not to catch anyone’s conspiratorial eye; she was afraid she’d start laughing. Fortunately—or not—there were none to be found.
Jody, sitting next to the hostess directly across the table from Alice, was telling the story of losing her dog in Central Park two months ago. Alice suddenly had a feeling for how many people she must have bored with her own story.
I let her off leash like always near Sheep Meadow. She loves to run. She’s so good. I mean, she never bothers anyone. And then—
Alice tried to pity her but all she could do was assess the Pucci purse, Thierry Rabotin wedges, asymmetrical Botox effect around the eyes, and jeans that a woman hovering around sixty should long since have handed down to her daughter—or granddaughter. Jody’s dog Pug was not a pug. He was a French bulldog.